Markdown to HTML Converter — Render & Copy

What this tool does

It turns Markdown into the HTML that Markdown stands for. Markdown is a writing shorthand — a # means a heading, asterisks mean emphasis, a hyphen means a list item — and this page expands that shorthand into the corresponding tags. It is the step you need when a system takes HTML but you would rather write Markdown, or when you want to see exactly what a Markdown fragment will produce before it goes onto a page.

The syntax it renders

Markdown	HTML
# H1 … ###### H6	<h1> … <h6>
**bold** / _italic_	<strong> / <em>
[text](url)	<a href="url">
- item / 1. item	<ul> / <ol>
```code```	<pre><code>
> quote	<blockquote>

Escaping, and why it matters

The renderer escapes the text before it applies any formatting, so an angle bracket in your Markdown becomes a visible character rather than the start of a tag. That closes the door on one of the commonest ways a "render my Markdown" feature turns into an injection bug. The trade-off is that raw HTML embedded in Markdown is displayed as text, not executed — a deliberate choice in favour of safety.

Where a Markdown renderer is useful

Documentation pipelines, README previews, comment systems, email templates and CMS fields all take HTML but are authored in Markdown. Having a renderer you can paste into — and see the exact output before it ships — removes the guesswork about how a piece of Markdown will actually render.

Markdown is a text format, not a rich-text format

The value of Markdown is that the source is readable as plain text — a # looks like a heading even before it is rendered. That is also its limitation: it cannot express anything the plain text cannot hint at. There are no colours, no font sizes, no text alignment, and no positioning. When someone asks for those in Markdown, the honest answer is that they want HTML or a document format, and the Markdown renderer is the wrong layer.

What "rendered" means here

This tool converts the Markdown source to HTML markup, which is the step a CMS, a static-site generator or a README pipeline performs. It does not display a styled preview — the output is the HTML, which is what you need to paste into a template or a field that accepts markup. If you want to see what the HTML looks like when displayed, paste it into a page; that is the browser's job, not a converter's.

Safety: escaping comes before formatting

The renderer escapes the text before applying any formatting, so a < in your Markdown becomes < rather than being interpreted as a tag. That is the safer default and it means raw HTML embedded in Markdown is shown as text rather than rendered. It also means the output is safe to insert into a page without a separate sanitiser pass — though if you concatenate it with other untrusted content, that content needs its own treatment.

Where Markdown is a poor fit

• Anything that must be laid out — columns, sidebars, precise spacing. Markdown has no layout model, and the usual workaround (raw HTML in the source) defeats the format.
• Documents with tracked changes or comments — those are features of a document format, not a text format.
• Data exchange — Markdown tables are for human reading, not for parsing. Use CSV or JSON when a program will consume the value.
• Content with heavy nesting — deeply nested lists and blockquotes become ambiguous, and different parsers resolve the ambiguity differently.

CommonMark versus dialects

The renderer implements the CommonMark core plus tables, which is the subset almost every system agrees on. Extensions such as footnotes, task lists, definition lists and math are not part of the core and each has several incompatible dialects — GitHub-flavoured, Pandoc, kramdown and others all differ. Sticking to the core is what makes the output portable: a document that renders here will render the same way in most other places.

Frequently asked questions

Go deeper

Longer explanations of the problems this tool solves:

Markdown conversion: HTML, tables and what is lossy

Sources

• CommonMark Spec — the syntax this renderer implements.
• GitHub Flavored Markdown Spec — tables.